


what they learn

by kwritten



Series: Finding a Balance [7]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-06
Updated: 2015-04-06
Packaged: 2018-03-21 13:26:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3693923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>future-fic within this series in which Dawn is attending Berkeley; Dawn and Buffy deal with their sister being in another city</p>
            </blockquote>





	what they learn

_Dawn comes home from college in a little white pickup truck that she purchased for herself using leftover scholarship money. It's not even really a truck so much as it is a collection of scraps of metal that have been somehow fused together. It's stick and it stalls about twenty times before she pulls into the driveway. It can't go faster than about fifty miles per hour without making a wheezing sound and so it took her twice as long to get home as she would have liked._

_She loves everything about her little truck even if she does spend about 90% of her free time complaining about it._

_Buffy and Tara are waiting on the porch for her, hot chocolate in their hands and their feet up on the porch railing. They're wearing the socks she knit them during her knitting-phase that didn't really last all that long and matching Christmas sweaters even though it's February._

_She's just home for the weekend to do laundry, but for them it almost seems like more. She can see it glinting in their eyes as she walks up the driveway._

 

 

Dawn leaves for college in the station wagon that Tara inherited from an elderly aunt on her mother's side that got in touch after she found out that Tara was in college and living with a girl. She was a mean old thing and died only four months later, but she left Tara most of everything she had. Which wasn't much. They sold what they could and donated the rest and paid off bills with her savings and in the end there was a little car. It wasn't new and it wasn't old, it was just a car and Tara loves it. They load it up with boxes and some flea-market furniture and Spike surprises her with a little mini-fridge and Buffy decides not to confiscate the bottles of cheap beer she knows are inside because Dawn deserves a little college fun.

And it isn't like she didn't drink too much when she was a Freshman, but generally they all let her forget that.

They drive her up the coastline to Berkeley and sing loudly to music they'd hate under any other circumstances and talk about absolutely nothing at all. On their way home, Buffy cries and Tara holds her hand as she drives. One hour out of the city, Dawn calls Buffy's cell phone frantic with fear and anxiety and they pull over and put her on speaker phone and calm her down as best they can, and they both fight the urge to go back and hold her until she stops being afraid but they don't.

Buffy knows it's best for Dawn to take this last step alone, but she's still glad Tara is driving, because she doesn't trust herself to be rational forever. 

 

Revello Drive is quieter now. Sometimes Buffy will find herself shouting at Dawn up the stairs and only after angrily pounding up and shoving open the door does she realize that there's no one there. Just an empty room with a pair of pajama-pants bunched up on the floor, forgotten.

"I shouldn't feel like this, feel like an old lady whose sent her child off to war."

"College is a bit like war."

"But I'm not an old lady."

"Well... last night you fell asleep at seven watching _Golden Girls_ with Sunggyu so..."

"But she's not _my_ kid."

Tara sits down next to her on the bed, loping her arm around Buffy's shoulders, "She's more than that."

 

 

The summer after Buffy crawled out of her own grave and found the world too harsh, too still, too loud, too frantic, Dawn would sometimes find her in the kitchen, sitting down by the sink in-between the cupboard and the kitchen island, knees pulled up to her chest and eyes wide. They’d eat OREOS with peanut butter and Dawn wouldn’t say anything at all. Just wait for Buffy to nod and then they’d troop back upstairs to their beds.

Now, she sits on the cool linoleum alone and eats the organic chips Sam insists are better for them because of the lack of high-fructose corn syrup and there’s no little girl coming down the stairs to rescue her from her own mind so she eats the whole bag and no one mentions it in the morning.

 

Dawn starts writing old-fashioned letters with stamps and envelopes and sends them in brown packages along with candies or flyers for parties or ticket stubs or beer coasters or a paper with a big red “A” on the front. 

Tara finds Buffy one day standing in the foyer with a package in her hands and an odd look on her face.

“What is she learning out there?” As if the entire world was hidden in the grounds of Berkeley University.

“Things you can’t teach her.”

“Did I teach her enough?”

“You taught her what you knew.”

 

 

Two months in to her first semester Dawn gets arrested at a protest and the resulting phone call makes Buffy’s head swirl. Sam congratulates her on fighting the good fight – even though Buffy is pretty sure the whole damn thing was about a tree – Sunggyu writes her a song on youtube, Anya sniffs and waxes poetics about the beauty of capitalism, and Tara warns her to be safe. 

“What is she going to teach me, next?”

“Everything she learns.”

“Will I be able to keep up?”

“Would she really let you fall behind?”

And Buffy thinks: yes. But shrugs instead. 

 

 

_Dawn gets in her truck with her fresh laundry and she hugs her sister goodbye and takes Tara’s arm for a minute. They watch Buffy walk back into the house._

_“My wrist is better. Thank you for not telling.”_

_Tara’s eyes are serious, “I think what you are doing is stupid.”_

_Dawn smiles and thinks of the hash-marks in red on her dorm room wall, one mark for every vampire she’s caught unawares in her new town, “I’m only doing what she taught me to do.”_

_“Put yourself in terrible danger and possibly die?”_

_They don’t laugh because it isn’t a joke. It’s more true than anything else they’ve ever known._

_“Fight.”_


End file.
